It is hard work being incorporated, not least due to the statutory requirement to start keeping all the pieces of paper that one encounters during a typical working day, instead of putting them in the bin immediately, as normal people do. "How long do I have to hang on to all this stuff?" I asked my accountant, irritatedly. "Well, by law, a minimum of seven years, but I would recommend you keep them indefinitely, just in case".

Indefinitely? I already have a whole shelf full of files, and I have only been in business for a month. Plus I have never been very good with paper, it gives me a headache. "What if I scan them in to the PC, and store them that way?" I asked. "No you can't do that" he said, looking shocked. "They have to be filed properly. In fact, you should really be printing out any relevant emails, and keeping hard copies of those as well."

At this rate I shall have no time to do any actual work, all my time will be taken up with filing things. Apparently, though, and again according to my accountant, this will not be an issue, since my business model doesn't actually require me to do any work. "Essentially, your core activity is to sell on labour, at a profit."

"My labour?"

"Well, obviously you could do that, but it would be very inefficient. Plus, you would be limiting your growth. No, you need to sell other peoples' labour. Look at it this way, if you had ten people working for you, and you marked up their rates by 10%, then you would end up with the equivalent of a whole normal salary in profit."

I searched, vainly, for the flaw in this argument.

"Plus, you already have five people you are buying in and selling on, you are half way there."

"So in fact, if I just marked them up by 20% instead, I wouldn't have to find any more people at all?"

"Well, yes, if you think your client would stand that. Would they?"

"Yes, I would just tell them I was adding a lot of value."

"OK, well, there you go."

I do think Marx had something to say about this approach, and its consequences, but I am too busy filing things away to go and check what it might have been.

Disposition: depressed
Listening to: Don Henley - If Dirt Were Dollars

I am supposed to be doing all sorts of important and business-like things, such as preparing work breakdown schedules, putting together estimates, and submitting proposals, but in fact all I have managed to accomplish so far this year in terms of activities which might feasibly be construed as productive is purchase a lever arch file, the intention having been to put all my business-related correspondence in it. Depressingly, however, it turns out that I don't actually have any business-related correspondence yet, or at least none in physical form suitable for being filed. I do have several folders on my PC, with items like 'General Terms and Conditions of Contract.doc' in them, and also an Outlook folder called 'Business Mail', mostly containing questions to my accountant, and his replies ('buy a lever arch folder, and put things in it'). Plus I can log on to my Business Bank Account, and see incontrovertible evidence of the frivolous things my company has so far purchased (using the money I have lent it, I might add) but short of taking screenshots of these, purposely in order to file them, which seems a little pointless, I have no corporeal evidence of my status as an SME at all. In fact, the only thing I can find to put in this file so far is the receipt for it, and this, irritatingly, isn't big enough to stretch across the two metal posts, so it won't even fit properly. It just hangs there, limply, dangling sadly from its single punch hole.

Discouraged by this, I decided to find out what had happened to all my childhood friends and acquaintances instead, by typing their names into Google, and seeing what it came back with. Before you say anything, I know this is generally regarded as being a Sad thing to do, and an even sadder thing to admit to doing, but I am an honest pig, and freely admit to such minor failings as I have. In truth, I have never really subscribed to the dictum that if you do not bury the past, it will bury you, in my view it is both desirable and necessary to inspect the past at frequent intervals, exhuming it if required, since it provides not only a useful, and generally salutary, perspective on the present, but also, by extrapolation, an unequivocal indication of one's future trajectory. In my defence, I don't do this sort of thing very often, and indeed it only occurred to me to do it now as a result of having recently received an email from someone whom I last saw when I was nine. 'I have a hunch we were childhood friends in Zambia', she said. And indeed we were, and I suspect she is probably technically the first woman I went to bed with, since we used to sit and read comics together there in the morning after a sleepover, with our pyjamas on. Sadly, I also remember this as being the most fun I have ever had in a bed.

Anyway, it turned out to be quite interesting, this trawl through my past. What was most intriguing was how predictably people's lives, in the main, had turned out, given the blank canvas they had, in theory, been presented with. The people I knew in New Zealand are still in New Zealand, in fact most of them still appear to live in the same town, and for all I know possibly in the same house. A large number of the people I knew at school in Swaziland are now senior government officials in South Africa, which makes sense, given the timeline of events there, and the advantages afforded them by their libertarian educational background. Everyone from Imperial has become an engineer, of some description, with grey hair and glasses, and has a spouse, and grown up children. The girl who used to take me to the theatre in Cambridge has, unsurprisingly, become an actress, and the people who used to be most effective at organising punting trips and parties have, as might be expected, all become CEOs and venture capitalists.

Puzzlingly, some people appear not to exist at all, there being no record of them anywhere on the Internet. I am not sure what to make of this, I cannot imagine how it is possible for anyone of my generation to have escaped being Googleable. Perhaps they do exist in the real world, and are out and about doing things, and having a life like normal people, but really, what are they thinking? I can't see the use of just existing physically, without there being any record of you anywhere on the web. It would be like being a weed, or a pebble, just some undistinguished piece of nature, lying about pointlessly somewhere. The web is where we go to find things, if you aren't in it, you can't be found, and to all intents and purposes you might as well not exist at all.

Possibly I just imagined them, like I did the subject line of this post, which I was sure was the title either of a book, or a song, but Google tells me is no such thing. Or, even more worryingly, perhaps Google is hiding them (and the song), for some nefarious reason. How would I know? What would I do if Google suddenly decided not to show any evidence of my being real, either?

Perhaps I will print out those screenshots after all, and file them away in my lever arch folder, just in case. As a form of backup.

Disposition: scared
Listening to: ELP - Tarkus

There will, apparently, be an extra second interposed into the normal countdown to the New Year tonight, supposedly to account for the slowdown in the earth's rotational period due to the languorous embrace of the moon, although this does appear to me to be an suspiciously romantic explanation for what must, when all is said and done, be a simple exercise in accounting.

These interstitial leap seconds are, it would seem, a fairly regular occurrence, and generally occasion little disturbance amongst the public at large, apart from those tasked with deciding what time it is, who understandably regard them as troublesome in the extreme, and have gone so far as to suggest (in all seriousness) that we just accumulate additional seconds until we have enough to make up a whole leap hour, and then unleash them all at once. I myself see this as simple procrastination, since effectively it just allows the current generation of timekeepers to delay having to deal with the problem until they are safely dead, and no longer bear any responsibility for it.

Plus, there is a lot that can happen in a second, and it is a good idea to give people an extra one every now and again, and see what they do with it. Mostly, of course, they will waste it, saying 'well, a second, nothing happens in a second, give me an hour and I will make good use of it, but a second, that is no help at all, it is far too short'. Challenge them on this assertion, however, and ask them to describe their life-changing moments, and you will find that without exception, they all happened in a second. Even my own experience, corralled and constrained though it has been by my obsessive desire to analyse and to plan, tells me that when things happen, they happen in an instant.

For example, I was sitting at my desk, in my little student room in King's, early in the morning, when I suddenly realised that correcting for the motion of my Deep-Tow receiver was in fact just a special case of diffraction-stack migration, and could thus be dealt with using the wealth of approaches and techniques devised to handle that very problem. I remember exactly the moment that occurred to me, and it was, literally, a moment. Antecedent to this point I had been glumly trying to work out how to parameterise the complex time-varying geometries involved into something encodable, and more importantly, something that could be presented in my thesis without making me look like an idiot, the next minute I not only had a solution, but a solution so dazzling in its simplicity, and breathtaking in its implications, that it probably merited a whole chapter just on its own.

I also remember the instant when it occurred to me, after having laboriously constructed a mechanism whereby user interfaces could be described in text files, and instantiated on demand, that there was no reason why I shouldn't describe all of the rest of my software like this as well, and produce purely declarative programs. This may not seem like such a big deal now, what with XUL and XAML, but at the time, fifteen years ago, it was a conceptual leap. And it happened as I was sitting in the Green Dragon, in Lovedean, on a Tuesday evening, on my way home from work. In an instant, my understanding of software changed, and that sudden realisation altered my approach to it completely.

There are of course the less happy moments, which in retrospect become the boundaries between the before and the after in our lives. When the doctor asks you to come back in to discuss the results of your tests, or your girlfriend says 'we need to talk', or the phone rings late at night. All of them, however, are characterised by the fact that they occur in the endless, infinite space of a second, and nothing is ever the same afterwards as it was before. So be watchful, and wary, tonight.

Disposition: moody
Listening to: Yes- Onward

"Sclerotic habituation? What do you do, just pick words at random from a thesaurus?"

"No, I choose them very carefully. Those words summed up exactly what I meant."

"Well, nobody else knows what they mean, so its a bit of waste of time, really. You just look like you're trying to be clever."

Sigh. I suppose they were right, technically I could have written 'a pattern of reduction in psychological or behavioural response, due to repeated occurrence of the same stimulus, which may be likened to the hardening of cellular structures, particularly those of the eye, and is particularly apposite in this context, since not only does it convey the implication of a dysfunction related to narrowed experience, specifically one resulting in decreased suppleness and flexibility, but also a condition which is primarily associated with the organ of vision, and it is the inability to see the unexpected, as we grow older, that this whole web log entry is about.'

However, if I personally had come upon that sentence, in someone else's blog, I would have thought to myself "How bizarre, why don't they just say 'sclerotic habituation', if that's what they mean?". To my mind, you don't purposely ignore perfectly good words that already exist, by making up new ones that mean the same thing, or by laboriously substituting them by their definition, on the off chance that someone may not have encountered them before. It is horrendously inefficient, for one thing, not to mention boring. Dictionary.com is, after all, only a mouse click away.

Perhaps, though, that is just my prejudice. I am after all a software developer, and that is how we work. Faced with any task, we immediately try and find some existing software that already performs that task, or something as close as possible to it, and we use that. In fact, it is positively frowned upon to duplicate anything that already exists, since it adds needless complexity, and introduces all sorts of maintenance and support issues. The most highly-regarded developers are those who produce software that can be used in a variety of circumstances, since they contribute vastly to the common weal. And, correspondingly, bad developers will typically emit yards and yards of code, until someone points out that they could just have used System.Web, or whatever, and saved themselves the effort.

Quite apart from the practical advantages, there is an aesthetic pleasure that derives from the use of these rich components, which convey such subtleties of meaning, and complexities of function, so efficiently. I was watching a video yesterday of a presenter at Microsoft's PDC connecting up a XAML reader component with a DOM tree viewer, and a WPF renderer, all in the same window, and it really was a delight, because it only took about three lines of code.

At its heart, that is what poetry is, I suspect - this leveraging of the reader's prior knowledge, so that vast machineries of understanding, and of emotional response, can be invoked and manipulated with the lightest of stimuli, as long as the touch is deft enough.

Apropos of which, having laboriously assembled, by dint of cutting and pasting from other relevant examples, a ten-page document entitled 'General Terms and Conditions of Contract', which my accountant insists I need to have, I must confess I am sorely tempted to replace the whole thing with a single phrase, which will hopefully embody by triggered inference and implication the sum total of my thoughts on the matter, the ethic of reciprocity being a moral value understood and resonant with meaning in all cultures and faiths:

"Do unto others as you would have others do unto you"

Disposition: working
Listening to: Roy Harper - New England

It is a comfort to be surrounded by like-minded people, which is I suppose one of the reasons why we become increasingly irritable, inexpressibly discontented, and generally more crotchety with age. Our friends and our relations grow, like ivy, into the cracks and crevices of their own individual experience and circumstance, shaping themselves over the years into inscrutably Byzantine complexities of form, altered and adapted to function only within the small and intensely personal evolutionary niche they have ended up inhabiting. Suitably moved, or sufficiently inebriated, they will for short periods regress to the companionable and fun-loving proto-person we used to know, and love, and feel at one with, but for the most part they remain trapped in their own private tar pit of sclerotic habituation, diminished expectation, and, one assumes, or would at least hope, bitter regret.

Which is why I have always felt it was my duty to try and jog people out of this depressing mindset, partly for selfish reasons, since I hate not having anyone to chat to, but mostly as an altruistic exercise, since I am sure they can't really find it very exciting, to be stuck in a life where everything happens exactly as they expect. Plus, it can't possibly be good for them, thinking they know what's going on, and having opinions about things. It is a well known fact that people with opinions are not only very tedious to be with, but are also responsible for most of the vexation and violence in the world, there being no recorded example in history of anyone ever getting into even a mild argument as a result of their lack of strong feelings about things, let alone starting a war, or instigating a genocide. Belief and certainty lead inevitably to bigotry and intolerance, and it is our social duty to try to stamp out such dysfunction where we encounter it, even if that means irritating our friends. Or, in fact, total strangers.

Depressingly, one of the side effects of being certain about things is that people become completely oblivious to any phenomenon which doesn't match their preconceived expectations. At school, when we reached the heady heights of the sixth form, one of our privileges was to be allowed into the staff room after Sunday Service, to mingle with the teachers (or at least those of them who hadn't anything better to do of an evening than be mingled with by a bunch of spotty teenagers), and meet the visiting speaker. Initially, this was quite exciting, since we were allowed to drink wine, and smoke cigarettes, and practice being at a cocktail party, in case this turned out to be useful in later life. After a while, though, we grew bored with just standing in a circle around the same (usually incredibly boring) person we had just been forced to listen to for an hour, whilst sitting on a hard bench and wearing an uncomfortable blazer, so we decided to liven it up a bit, by agreeing beforehand on some subtly odd characteristic we would all pretend to have, such as an apparent obsession with turnips, or constantly looking at our watches, and then seeing what their reaction was.

Anyway, this turned out to be a completely pointless activity, since no matter how bizarrely we behaved, not one of the guests ever appeared to notice anything amiss at all. One evening, after having exhausted ourselves with an extremely complex, but ultimately ineffectual piece of group choreography involving trying to make the speaker revolve as many times as possible, by taking it in turns to ask him questions whilst simultaneously rotating our circle in small steps clockwise when he wasn't looking, we decided to abandon the project, and just go back to trying to drink as much of the free wine as possible. Subsequently, of course I discovered that this was a well known phenomenon, apparently we see only what we expect to see, our eyes presumably taking the view that if we have already decided what to think, there is no need for them to inform us about what's actually going on.

Undeterred by this early failure, I have continued in my public-spirited attempts to disconcert people, to no great effect, I fear, although I do recall many years ago one person saying to me "The first time I met you I spent ages telling you how much I liked France, and French culture, and the French way of doing things, and then when I'd finished talking I suddenly realised I didn't know anything about France at all", which I found quite gratifying. More recently I have found a new project, which is to try and disconcert my landlady, or in fact, to force any reaction out of her at all. It is not that I have very much to do with my landlady, since she visits only once or twice a year, either to attempt to remove some vital piece of furniture that she feels I am not making adequate use of, or to relay some fatuous complaint about my living arrangements from the Residents' Association, such as that my computer screens are too bright.

She has obviously had quite an interesting life, this landlady, since whenever I mention anywhere I've been, it always turns out that she's been there too, or more usually has lived there for several years whilst holding some important official role, but never once have I seen her expression deviate in any way from that of a rather glum, and faintly bored chihuahua. This has increasingly been getting on my nerves, so last week I decided to mount a full frontal assault on her serenity. The reason on this occasion for her visit was to discuss my request for her to redecorate the flat ("I have been living in it very intensively" I explained to her on the phone) and to inspect the perennial plumbing dysfunction in my en-suite.

She arrived, as always, exactly at the appointed hour, and looked at me expressionlessly as I opened the door. "Tea? Coffee? Gin?" I asked, wandering into the kitchen. "Nothing, thank you" she said, standing motionless in the hall where I had left her. "I'll just look around, if I may". I led her first into the computer room, which I was quietly confident would on this occasion be bound to spark some reaction from her, due to my recent introduction not only of a further PC to add to the five already in situ, this time one with flashing red and green LEDs on its fans, and a transparent case, but also of two additional 22-inch monitors, which I had arranged so as to complete the perfect circle of screens around my swivel chair. Given that when I moved in the room had contained only a single bed, a floral quilt, and a small watercolour of a hummingbird, I thought she was bound to make some comment, even if only to ask what had happened to the bed.

"Hmm" she said, and wandered off into the sitting room, where she stared impassively for a while at the bed in the middle of it. "There was no space for it in the bedroom" I said, helpfully.

"I don't mind the walls being like this, myself, I prefer them, actually" I pointed out. "It's just that my visitors have started complaining. They say things like 'You need a lick or two of paint there'"

Surely this would trigger either contempt, or pity, I thought, wrongly as it turned out.

"Yes, I can see what they mean. What colour would you like them to be painted? The same as before?"

"Well," I said, pretending to consider the issue. "I suppose a dark smoky brown would be the most practical. Sort of nicotine coloured. Maybe with some kind of spider-web motif?"

No reaction. She moved on to inspect the en-suite. I had taken care to dismantle as much of the toilet, and the shower as possible, so as more effectively to portray its continuing failure to meet its functional specification.

"Not working again, then?" she said.

"No." Suddenly, a brainwave hit me. "You could rip it out."

"Rip it out?"

"Yes. Rip out the whole en-suite, and its walls. Then we wouldn't have to fix it."

She regarded me dispassionately with her lazy lizard eyes.

"Plus, then this bedroom would be much bigger, and I might be able to fit the other bed in it. Its a nuisance, having a bed in the sitting room."

"Hmm" she said.

It was no use. I had given it my best shot. I tried desultorily to engage her in a conversation about pigeons as she was leaving, but my heart wasn't really in it.

To add insult to injury, she phoned back a few days later. "I've been thinking about your very sensible suggestion to rip out the en-suite. If its OK with you, I'll go ahead and arrange that?"

Sometimes, you just have to admit that you've met your match.

Disposition: crushed
Listening to: Uriah Heep - Tales

I am still trapped in the hazy limbo that exists between having been on holiday, and being back in the day-to-day, a netherworld characterised by a vague sense of dissatisfaction, and a general reluctance to do anything in particular. Yesterday I was too bored even to look out of the window, since I knew that all I would see there would be Worthing, and pleasantly familiar though the prospect might be, it would lack the novelty and excitement of being the Brandenburg Gate, or the Wintermarkt in Potsdamer Platz. Which, this year, has an enormous toboggan slope right in the middle of it, with a constant stream of chortling children dragging their sledges up it, and sliding down again, while their parents drink Glühwein at one of the imitation log cabins and watch, admiringly.

I do think that the Europeans do fun better than the British, they seem less self-conscious about it. All we have in Worthing is a sad troupe of people in ponchos playing Incan pan pipes every Saturday (weather permitting) outside Marks and Spencers, and opposite them a mad person noodling away on his electric guitar, with a small amplifier, and a bored-looking dog, which sleeps on his rucksack, with its paws over its ears. Occasionally, in the summer, we have a French Market, where all the usual stall holders put on berets, and pretend, unconvincingly, to be French for the day. We are, if truth be told, a cynical and curmudgeonly race, and we find it difficult to suspend our disbelief, or quell our suspicion that if we let our guard down for an instant, someone will take advantage.

What I mostly miss about being on holiday, I think, apart from the view, is breakfast. Obviously I could make breakfast at home, but it wouldn't be the same at all. There is something about a hotel breakfast which gives a shape to the day, a sense that you are taking part in some shared ceremony of transition from the solitary self-indulgence of sleep to the participative collaboration of daily life. I can happily spend hours sitting at my little table, with its starched white cloth, watching the businessmen in their suits, poking importantly at their Blackberries, and the families arranging their children tidily in their seats, and the older couples scanning the buffet hopefully for something they recognise. I sip my coffee, and I nibble at my croissant, and, when I have fully charged myself with ambition, and intent, I stride out purposefully, part of the great diurnal migration of People With Things To Do.

There are, of course, some aspects of a communal breakfast which could do with improvement, most notably the toasting arrangements. Unless you insist that the waiter makes your toast for you, which renders you liable to accusations of being either pathetically incompetent, or lazy, you have to deal with the multi-user conveyor belt toaster, which appears to be the accepted method of providing toast to large numbers of people. Now although in theory the principle behind the conveyor belt toaster is perfectly sound, providing as it does a seamless flow of fresh toast, whilst also allowing people to choose their preferred bread type and thickness, in practice it becomes apparent that it fails to deal with simple human nature, in particular that element of human nature which, on being desirous of toast, and on seeing a slice of toast emerge from the toaster, will immediately appropriate that slice of toast, and take it back to their table, regardless of whether they were the person who put the toast in the toaster or not.

This naturally either confuses, or irritates, the person who did queue the toast in the first place, and I have lost count of the number of times I have seen people either peering into the innards of the toaster when they return, to try and work out what it has done with their piece of bread, or striding off angrily in pursuit of the person whom they suspect of having taken it. The problem is, of course, that one slice of toast looks much like any other, so it is difficult to prove the provenance of any particular instance. I myself became so irritated with losing toast in this fashion, when I used to stay regularly in the Belfast Holiday Inn, that I devised a cunning plan. Before putting the bread in the toaster, I would dip my finger in some milk, and draw a large letter 'A' on it. As a result, the toast would emerge monogrammed, and although it did occasionally cause some puzzlement and consternation, not to mention envy, amongst my fellow guests, it did mean that no-one ever felt they could get away with passing it off as their own.

Disposition: discontent
Listening to: James Taylor - Walking Man

"You have to make sure you write in it every day, otherwise it won't work" said my sister, when I announced that I was going to start a web log. I nodded in agreement, which I have always found to be the best approach when people suggest things to me, whilst privately resolving to continue to do as I had originally planned, and only write in it when I felt the urge. I regarded this as being only fair to any potential readers, since it would correspondingly relieve them of the onerous burden of having to read it every day, out of a sense of duty, whether they actually wished to or not.

As a consequence, the coverage afforded by such sporadic entries as I have been moved to post over the years regarding my life's continuing trajectory has turned out to be somewhat patchy, and I cannot help but notice that I appear not to have felt the desire to publicise any of my views, or even any of my activities, since last January. For the benefit of those requiring some sort of contextual continuity, however, I can helpfully summarise the last year as having been completely uneventful, or at least devoid of any events around which thought-provoking web log entries might be constructed.

For the most part I attribute this dearth of incident to the fact that I foolishly forgot to go on holiday, and as a result spent the year embedding myself more and more deeply into a rut of routine. Actually, I didn't so much forget to go on holiday, as make a mental note to go when it got sunny, failing to spot the huge flaw in this plan, namely that it was completely dependent upon it getting sunny. Which, this year, it didn't, as a result of which I found myself approaching the anniversary of last year's long weekend in Venice without having had any intervening visits abroad to leaven the otherwise dull and witless tenor of my day to day existence.

Luckily, however, I am a pig of action, so once this regrettable state of affairs had impinged itself upon my consciousness, I immediately decided to stop working for a bit, and go to Berlin, it being too late in the year to attempt to find any warmer spots to visit. Or at least any warmer spots worth visiting, in my youth I did once foolishly attempt a 'Winter Sun' holiday, and decided after the first day that I would rather be cold, or in fact dead, than bored, a preference which probably accounts for my solitary lifestyle. My only vivid memory of that holiday is being harangued by my allotted tour guide who, having failed in all their attempts to interest me in the various social gatherings and coach trips available, eventually said "I don't know why you bothered to come on holiday at all, if all you're going to do is sit there and read." After this humiliating, not to mention tedious, experience, I decided only to take my vacations in places where there was no requirement to talk to other people, unless you were ordering a drink, and where the attractions were sufficiently close that you could walk to them, rather than having to travel for hours on a coach, wondering whether you were having fun yet.

In keeping with my usual approach to going anywhere, I elected to stay in the most luxurious hotel I could find, on the basis that this would not only ensure that I would still have a nice time even if Berlin as a whole turned out to be boring, or damp, but also, more importantly, mean that I didn't have to worry about whether or not I was getting value for money, the probability of this being, as mathematicians so poetically term it, vanishingly small. I do honestly believe that a great deal of the stress, worry and unhappiness people encounter in this world is directly attributable to a naive expectation that they are interacting with large corporations as equals, and might, in the few minutes they have available for investigation of some potential purchase, spot a subtle pricing anomaly hitherto unnoticed by the many thousands of full-time employees working diligently for these companies with the sole purpose of ensuring that such loopholes never occur. The fact of the matter is that corporations are required by law to maximise shareholder profit by extracting as much money out of people as possible whilst giving them as little as they can get away with in return, and they have many more resources at their disposal in the pursuit of this aim than we are able to deploy in our attempts to thwart it.

Paradoxically, it is usually far more sensible purposely to select the most outrageously extortionate supplier of a product or service one can find, on the basis that their profit margins will be so large that they will have money to spare on extras, such as customer service. Or, in the case of hotels, large numbers of people just standing about waiting for you to express, or even imply, some need or fancy that they might gratify. In pursuance of this aim I was briefly frustrated by the fact that there appeared to be two luxury 5 stars of equally impeccable credentials, not to mention equally eye-watering rates, however, Solomon-like, I resolved the problem by electing to stay at both of them, one after the other. This did cause some puzzlement when I checked in to the second, since in response to the solicitous query "Have you had a long journey?" I replied brightly "No, I walked". To give her credit, the receptionist took this in her stride, dealing with eccentrics being presumably just part and parcel of daily life at a Ritz-Carlton. She did however take care to give me a full tour of my room, pointing out the location, and indeed the function, of its various appurtenances, including the bed. I tried to look impressed. "What a large bed!" I said. "Yes, and all for you! On your own!" she replied, cruelly.

Having thus established my status as a sad and pathetic person, who had for some reason apparently walked all the way from England to spend the night alone in a luxury bed, she left, so I tested out the chair, by sitting in it, and looked out of the window, sipping ruminatively from a Berliner Kindl I had found in the minibar. If truth be told, I did have a large number of things to reflect upon, foremost amongst which was the fact that I recently decided to incorporate myself, and thus had to face a future of being employed by myself, and, more problematically, being paid by myself. Having cogitated upon this apparent conundrum for a while, I reached the conclusion that whatever the full range of implications might be, they would almost certainly include my not being able to afford to go on holiday ever again. I finished off the Kindl, put on my suit, and went down to the restaurant, determined to go out in a blaze of shallowness, and contentment.

Disposition: rushed